Madam, - Peter Malone is quite wrong to equate the prosecution of David Irving with that of Orhan Pamuk (January 11th).
Austria is prosecuting Irving for denying that the Holocaust ever happened. Turkey has brought Pamuk to court for "insulting his country" by saying that Turkey was responsible for what no one denies did happen to hundreds of thousands of Armenians. "Denigrating Turkish identity" is the offence with which Pamuk is charged, because he accepts the evidence of, among others, Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador in Constantinople from 1913 to 1916, that the Turkish government engaged in the systematic annihilation of Armenians. That government has always maintained that Armenians who collaborated with the invading Russian forces were deported to Syria and that many of them died of exposure, famine and disease on their journey.
There is, I think you will agree, a considerable difference between denying that something has ever happened, and - stubbornly - insisting that though it did happen, you were not responsible.
Whether "denigrating national identity" should be part of a country's criminal code is an entirely different matter, but I cannot help recalling all those occasions in this country when the accusation of being "anti-national" was the most serious that could be hurled at someone who held different views. - Yours, etc,
MAURICE A O'SULLIVAN, Bray, Co Wicklow.